


Up is Down

by archea2



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Caring Sam Winchester, Curses, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Season/Series 13 Spoilers, Season/Series 14 Spoilers, Sexual Dysfunction, Tenderness, Vulnerable Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 07:05:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17862647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: Dean's terrible pun earns him a witch's curse, and it all goes downhill from there. Or does it?(Not a crack fic.)





	Up is Down

**Author's Note:**

> Guys, I don't even know. Be indulgent with Baby's first sexual dysfunction fic!
> 
> (Comments and kudos all the more appreciated.)

In retrospect, yeah - a crappy line.

Not even heartfelt - because they were on the last lap of their journey home, having breached the Kansas frontier somewhere about noon, only they _were_ at a Subway, and the sandwich girl _had_ given Dean a footlong, thus a too-good-to-let-pass innuendo. Dean had risked it mostly for Sam’s reaction shot, which hadn’t disappointed, and who cared if the girl could hear him?

Next thing he knew, she was giving him some coins, a knowing smile, and a quiet “ _Small_ change for you, sir.”

Back in the car, the Subway already dwarfed to a green blob in Baby’s mirrors, the emphasis had struck Dean as odd. But even then, he’d never paid it a lick of attention. One hunt down, one co-pilot slipping into his post-lettuce nap, all was well with Dean Winchester’s world. Miles later, still warm and relaxed, he’d glanced into the mirror and it had shown him Sam’s mouth, slack, half open as Sam burrowed deeper into sleep. It made Sam look younger and... accessible, his face wholly focused on his enjoyment of rest even as it lolled sideways towards Dean. Dean had felt something in him strain in answer, a synched tug on in his heart and his groin, only for the latter to burst into full brilliant pain. So startlingly brutal it had been gasped out of him.

“... Huh?” A mumble at his ear.

The pain had lanced him again, electric-like, as Dean doubled up over the wheel, the level segment of road dancing across his sight. He couldn’t breathe; couldn’t speak; could only hand over the wheel to instinct and slam the brakes home, swerving them into a little forest lane on the outskirts of Smith County. For the next agonized beat, Dean’s brain saw red-hot and _crash_. Then the shock abated, slowly, leaving a phantom pain in its trail. It still coalesced in his groin, and when he trailed a hand down, pressing his palm against his unruly member, the pain rocketed up again.

“ _Shit!_ ”

Sam, still  - thankfully - strapped at his side, was staring wide-eyed.

“Need to stop,” Dean mouthed, the dusk red in his eyes, flooding them with tears of pain. He’d endured worse, but only once had _worse_ targeted his midpoint, his crumple zone, and Dean felt mobbed by black memories. There had been a reason why “Daddy’s little girl” had been Alastair’s favored taunt.

He felt Baby’s metallic shudder in his spine and ground his fist harder into his crotch, only for the pain to impale him.

But his hand was being pried loose; he was being wrestled, Sam’s body suddenly close, his voice a vibrant nonsense of “Hey, hey, let me check, Dean, _let_ me”, until a hand that wasn’t his clasped his thigh and the pain dropped to a hum.

Dean wailed, but whether the wail was “Hell” or “Help”, it was muted by a surge of relief as Sam touched him again. Touched him further up, and the lancing pain deflated, his crotch growing blissfully limp under Sam’s fingertips.

He could breathe again, but with the breath came fear and the first onrush of shame, shadowing the fear.

“Better? Better now?” Sam’s voice at his ear, a scared placation, and he could only nod when Sam said “Christ, Dean, talk to me”. At some point during pain peak, he had dis-encased Dean’s legs from the footwell, dragged them up and apart on each side of his own lap, and unbuttoned the placket of Dean’s jeans. Dean took a peep downward, and - yeah. Barely a swell now.

Like Sam’s touch had caused both Dean’s cock and the agony to flatline.

“ _Small_ change for me,” Dean muttered, and began to laugh - hard, helpless and crazed.

He closed his eyes, readying himself for Sam’s long overdue _I told you_ , but Sam only closed his hand on Dean’s flank. The hand stayed, a shield, and  when Dean’s laughter became too humid to be ignored, Sam angled himself even more impossibly to cover Dean’s forehead too.

 

* * *

 

They drove all the way back, of course they did.

But the girl was gone, of course she was. Worse, nobody seemed to have any idea of who she was: not even the salt-and-pepper old coot who ran the shop. The only female staff they had was his Bess, he said, and she in town the last three days, young Tom, their eldest, stuck in the hospital with a broken foot. So now it was just him and Jacinto, who nobody with their fair count of marbles would think of calling a lady or a tramp. Speaking of, what's her name again?

But in Dean’s memory she was pared down to a voice and a hand, and never, never had he wished so hard he’d taken a good strong look at her person.

Sam, who _had_ looked at her name tag, racked his memory in vain. Witch or tricktress, the girl was a natural. There’d be no finding her in a State-wide radius by now.

They took a good strong look at the coins she’d given Dean, but every dime and quarter came up clean.

It was as if half a lifetime of one-size-fits-all “sweetheart”, and Tampa jokes, and  “they smell like food” had taken a rain check on his prick and his pride. And, okay, maybe he deserved it. But Sam?

Sammy had done nothing that warranted him being part of the curse. And there - as he turned the car once more homeward, Sam biting the flesh of his underlip, his concern palpable in the closeted air - lay Dean’s fear. That whatever curse afflicted Dean, ready to ladle a new dose of hurt, shame or self-belittling, would drag Sam into its orbit. Would cripple the two of them and their bond in its wake.

Sam spoke up once, because Sam. The night sky was breaking out the stars above Lebanon, while at ground level the town’s first neon signs came out. “We’ll find a cure,” he said.

Dean snorted stonily.

“Dude. Not signing up for chemical castration.”

“I’d never want that for you,” Sam said, hoarse-voiced, and something in Dean’s mortal coil of flesh uncoiled; struggled up; raised a sharp flare of pain, that settled down when Sam pushed himself into Dean’s gaze and side, his face mulish with the will to care. They drove on, and the curse lay dormant for the next hours.  

 

* * *

 

The next days were spent doing the Winchester deed, rinse, repeat.

Sam hit the books. Sex magic was ridiculously ill-covered in the Men of Letters’ annals, to the point that Sam wondered if their calling implied a vow of chastity, old-school Jedi style, that extended to their library. The best it could offer was a bunch of medieval French recipes on the art of  _dénouer les aiguillettes_. Sam had to call up Rowena, once Madame Olivette’s star pupil, so she could spell it out for him: _anti-ligatura_ , herbs that would dissolve any witch’s attempt to bind up a man’s loins so he could no longer get it up, and who might ye be asking for, Samuel?

“Online acquaintance,” Sam said, too quickly. “Huh, what if the issue is not getting it up - rather, it getting so painful it has to be, uh, gotten down at all costs?”

“Aye,” said Rowena. “The _Satyros Martyros_ , now that’s a rare one. Nasty one, too. Well, you can try him on coloquinth - bitter cucumber, that is - and bromide, thrice a day. No red meat, no chili. No coffee drink in any size or guise.” A pause. A distinct note of glee. “Beer is right out.”

“Oh, come _on_!” The sheer magnitude of his ever getting Dean to quit proteins and caffeine cold turkey had Sam close his eyes. “Rowena, I’d really, truly appreciate a counter-spell.”

“Me too. My, the things I’d trade you for it, Sam Winchester! But no. Your… acquaintance will have to wait until his libido’s expiry date.” The next pause was stretched thin and brittle, until Sam nearly snapped it by clamping his phone shut, stopped by Rowena’s untypically bland voice.

“There might be a silver lining for Dean.”

“My brother’s pain is no laughing mat -”

“A man’s flesh is one with his blood,” Rowena intoned, still bland. “A man’s blood gets a fresh start from his heart. What plagues the flesh, the heart can mend.”

“But -”

“So get your muttonhead brother to take it to heart.” And with that she hung up, leaving Sam to ponder her words.

Meanwhile, Dean had found his own mending shtick. Which was, surprise, surprise, to rerout his libido to his upper body, i.e. get up in arms and hunt round the clock. Sam jogged along the best he could, watching Dean’s arm rise and fall, fall and rise like a hammering Thor, until Dean collapsed under the ola wave of his endorphins.

“Good guys, good li’l guys,” Dean babbled around the ring of his beer bottle, letting it pop wetly out of his mouth. He winked over to Sam. “Nothing like a good pounding to clean up the pipes. See? I got it all figured out.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yeah, I do! I’m saying it to you.”

“Just... go take a shower, before you sweat and stink till _I_ die.”

“ ’s all good, man,” Dean insisted, because Dean’s buzz was on a roll, gifting him with the best afterglow after (a) sex, and (b) a power lap in Baby, whenever they drove with nothing but the road and the sky lying low on the end of it, Sam’s laughter adding its own _rah-rah-rah_. “Hey, it’s not like I get laid on a weekly basis these days. Last downtime was with that chick in the Larry bar, and as I recall - or not - I got hit with the amnesia stick pronto, so it’s not like I can wax nostalgic about it. What’s wrong with substitutes? Eh? It’s the American way of… everything. We got us plastic. We got us spam. And CGI. So until we fix this, I’m getting me hunt-made orgasms. Hungasms. Same difference, Sammy.”

Which was Sam’s cue to climb those stairs and close that bathroom door, because Quip or Quit might be Dean’s way of survival, but it didn’t have to be Sam’s. Not when there was no fix-it (a truth he still owed Dean) and every chance that Dean’s next hungasm, or the one right after, would be the end of him.

Sam locked the door and wrapped one of their thick, pure linen towels round and round his fist, methodically, before he drove it against the wall.

 

* * *

 

The airplane was black, but beautiful. With a four-cylinder engine, no less, currently emitting a plume of ominous black smoke. Dean could see the smoke streaming past his window, but nobody else seemed to know or care, and now the plane was taking off while they all cheered and yelled “Twelve… eleven… ten…” like some New Year’s Eve countdown. And then the plane must have exploded, because Dean was falling, was plummeting head first over the Atlantic Ocean with the squeaks of gulls in his ears, and the deep breath of the swell, and...

“Hey,” said Sam, falling alongside him. Only Sam was falling feet first, in typical Sam fashion, while the dream-blue sky enveloped them. No cloud in view, only the sun and Sam’s dimples when he caught Dean’s hand and pressed it to his heart. “Here. Hold tight, jerk.”

He was doing his upside-down smile, but now that Dean was falling head first the smile was up. The smile was dizzying, like the generous flare of Sam’s nostrils and the tiny clear mole near his nose, and his swollen, excited heartbeat pushing against Dean’s palm - like a vein - and -

Dean woke bolt upright, the pain a cross between a punch and a high-voltage shock. He yelled as the next wave engulfed his balls, the pain shooting up his belly and fountaining down his thighs. Crucifying the core of him, Dean’s cock a hot thick rod, darkly pulsing, like those hotshots some Kansas ranchers still used to prod their cattle with.

His head swam with the pain as he fisted one hand and drove it up his mouth, pushing the other down to gag the pain - or jerk it off, anything, _anything_ \- but flesh to flesh only made it worse; made it like his groin was being salted and burnt from the inside. He sobbed through his fist, once, and his door burst open, a dim shape standing in the frame before it lunged into his room and onto his bed.

“Dean!”

Dean sobbed again. But his treacherous knees had already parted, associating Sam and comfort even before Sam pushed himself up between them. The room was too dark to make him visible, but his voice brought a strange continuity of tone, as if part of Dean was still listening to Dream Sam. “Hey,” this Sam was saying, “hey, hey, hush. Shhh, De, let me. Let _loose_.” For Sam’s hand was wrestling his, still clasped over the pain, Dean’s knuckles the only fence between his dick and Sam’s naked palm. “Hey, it’s me. Dean, come on, I do the sewing up every time you have to clear a barbed wire gate. Know the inside of your thighs like the back of my hand.”

“Sam,” Dean said. He let his arms fall to his sides, allowing the slow upstrokes of Sam’s hand to tame the curse. Slowly, his dick began to let go of the pain, while something else welled up in him, higher up, somewhere in his chest.

Relief, like a cannabis hit. Only, not quite.

“It’s Sammy,” Sam said, and put his lips to Dean’s cheek. Not quite a kiss, but Dean turned into the embrace as a swimmer turns in the grip of a tide bigger than him. There was the shame again, tucked in the solace, but Sam must have sensed it because he not-kissed Dean again and whispered, “Only Sammy.”

“Sammy, I’m... it’s all on me, man. I fucked up, and now I’m fucking us up, and I don’t wanna, Sam. I don’t, I’m… I’m…”

“Giving me what I need,” Sam told his cheek, the murmur making a pattern with the ceasefire of pain, lulling Dean deeper into relief. “Letting me know you’re good, you’re safe, so you can have my back tomorrow and all the days after. Sword of Samuel, right?” He smiled, and Dean laughed a cracked little huff, his head swirled by a high that wasn’t sex, but, right then, felt better than sex had ever done.

“Who knew,” he said past a dry throat. “That you _letting me down_ was the good stuff after all.”

“Hush.” Sam’s upstrokes had decreased to his hand doing little more than hover protectively over Dean’s limp cock. “I got you, brother. Get some sleep.”

Dean closed his eyes again, and did not open them until the first clatter of pans and Sam’s holler for rescue from their vintage Bauhaus cooktop.

 

* * *

 

The next evening, Sam followed him to his room without a by-your-leave.

Dean, recalling his dream, stopped him right there. “You,” he said, “are not the penis alarm patrol."

"Dean..."

"Bed. Yours. _Now_.”

Got up three hours later to leave his door ajar, only to find Sam sitting cross-legged against the corridor wall.

 

* * *

 

And so it became another rhythm in the mad pacing of their lives, that close-quarters combat against a curse that was there to stay. Day in, they iced the bad guys and added to their zip code collection. Day out, they met in a bed.

Dean’s mind had pretzeled itself around the idea of Sam being the curse trigger _and_ defuser at once. It made some odd sense that Dean did not want to put under a microscope, but took in the way he’d accepted most anything to do with Sam being the Winchester black sheep and great white hope in one.

And maybe, up to a year ago, Dean would have chalked up his being put over the Boner Rack by Sam to some divine castigation for loving Sam in every human way. But no longer. Because Dean still recalled watching Chuck and Chuck's Sister bind their holy mojos so tightly you couldn't fit an atom between them. If God did the do, transsubstantially or otherwise, then the do was hardly a don’t. Right?

Not that he was in a position to do anything to Sam any time soon, in any case.

So he just lay back and let Sam have his way with him. After a while, he left a light on, just for a glimpse of Sam’s stupid, softhearted eyes, which at night looked like the brown eyes of sunflowers with a ring of light still clinging to them. The look in them eddied down Dean’s chest, sort of, pumping his heart with heat as Sam drove the pain away with his hand and his mouth - at Dean’s ear: a tireless litany of praise, that flooded Dean with even more endorphins than the pain relief. They made his heart quiver and contract, Sam’s night confessions of needing Dean, of looking up to Dean, of Dean being Sam’s north, sun and better half, and while Dean really should have seen these as the ego band-aid they were, he couldn’t help listening. Selfishly, sensuously.  

After that first night, Sam always made sure he never lay full-bodily over Dean, choosing inside to press sideways against him, propped on an elbow. Until Dean leant over him, avid for a wider expanse of Sam, and Sam sort of ended up crowding him from every angle but one.

“Good for you?” he’d ask and Dean would nod, not being the type to to go full-on Wiki and disambiguate. Not, that is, until Sam whispered “My De”, boosting Dean’s heartbeat to a rock-hard thrum, and another very solid part of Sam brushed his hip.

Sam froze, his next breath panicked - the prelude to a trail of “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ” if Dean’s hand hadn’t already seized and approved the root of the matter. His own cock was on its last throb-down, slipping into peaceful oblivion, but his heart was bursting; was _coming_ , even as he gave Sam the full span of his hand. It wasn’t perfect, because Dean was a complete novice at pleasuring another man, but it was good, it was, no two ways about it, as Dean told Sam again and again.

“Oh _fuck_ ” was all Sam managed, but it had a prayer’s reverence to it.

He let his mouth rest against Dean for the night, and when Dean resurfaced from his next bout of peace, Sam’s breath felt like a sigil against his chest.

 

* * *

 

It took two more nights to convince Sam that no, he was not conning or hustling or Stockholming Dean into a handjob, nor was the handjob making Dean wistful in the least. In the end, Dean straddled him so he could align Sam’s hard-on with the dip of his groin and show him proper _good_.

“Like a frickin’ evergreen stake,” he panted, bending his head to lock his and Sam’s sunflower gaze. “Proud of you, Sammy.”

Sam cried out, raising his face from the pillows, and Dean bent his, their heads touching, the wings of their noses. “I felt it,” he said across Sam’s long, ecstatic sigh, Sam’s gaze never leaving him. “When I was in Hell, when you were burying me. Felt it on my cheeks. On my lips.”

Sam’s gaze was on him.

“Made me hold on thirty years,” Dean said, and dipped his mouth to Sam’s.

 

* * *

 

Their ritual lasted another year, before their happily-never-after life crested again with Jack's arrival, their trip to Michael’s Mordor (and back again), and Dean honoring an eight-year-old lease so he could save Sam.

“Thing is…” Dean told him the first evening Sam gatecrashed his room, giving a grand total of no damns as to who saw him.

He sounded unDeanlike shy, brushing a finger down Sam’s dolphin cheek.

“Dean, I swear to God. If this is you keeping me out as some sort of penance…”

“Penance. Huh.” Dean uncrossed his legs, then quickly crossed them again. “No, it’s kinda the other way round.”

"Meaning?"

“Meaning, archangel trumps witch. And this one, uh. Did not take kindly to his vessel being an eunuch. So he... fixed me.”

“Oh,” Sam said, wide-eyed. He stared at Dean, and he saw the strange blend of hope and wistfulness. Saw Dean’s fear that, in unmaking the curse, Michael had made it impossible for Dean to find again that place of vulnerable bliss, and acted quickly.

"Good for _us_ ,” he told Dean, wrapping up the doubter in his arms. One warm beat, then Sam abandoned his weight to the hug and tumbled them backwards.

They were absolute gay beginners, as Dean would say later, and it did feel like a new first time. They took it slow; took it repeatedly, both of them holding back so Dean could feel his two pulses racing each other to the finish and be filled with wonder. It was long past midnight when they reached that peak from which they could, and did, freefall together gloriously.

“Heart over dick,” Sam heard Dean mumble, three-quarters gone.

It didn’t make a cent of sense, but to Sam, who felt better than he had in months, Dean's content was worth every sacred utterance in the lore.

“With you, always,” he said, and let Dean’s new mantra usher them into sleep.


End file.
